Page 66 - Eat Stop Eat by Brad Pilon PDF Program

Fasting and your Brain

I think this myth may not be the fault of the nutrition industry as much as it

is a carryover from our childhood. The idea that we must eat to fuel our brains may in
fact be true for children, as research seems to suggest that children do better in basic
school tests after they have had breakfast as opposed to when they skip breakfast.
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This makes sense, as children are still growing and developing, but is it true for adults

too?

As it turns out, the research doesn’t really support the idea that you get ‘dumb’ or
‘slow’ when you haven’t eaten for a couple of hours.

In a test where twenty-one university aged people were asked to perform a series of

intellectual tests after having either a normal meal, skipping one meal, skipping two
meals or going 24 hours without food, researchers found no difference in performance
on measures of reaction time, recall, or focused attention time. This led the authors
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of the study to conclude that short-term food deprivation did not significantly impair

cognitive function.

These results have been confirmed in additional studies where healthy young adults
ate as little as 300 calories over a two day period and experienced no decrease in tests
of cognitive performance (including vigilance, reaction time, learning, memory, and
reasoning), activity, sleep, and mood.
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Eat Stop Eat 44